PRESS RELEASE

For its summer show this year, Corbett vs. Dempsey presents an exhibition surveying some of the most significant historical figures associated with the Ox-Bow Summer School of Art in Saugatuck, Michigan. The show is part of the Centennial festivities for the Ox-Bow being held concurrently at museums and galleries in Chicago and Michigan this summer.

The CvsD show will include artwork dating back to the beginning of the 20th century with painters Frederick Fursman (one of Ox-Bow’s founders), Edgar Rupprecht, and Isobel Steele MacKinnon, as well as mid-century modernists Francis Chapin, Eleanor Coen, Max Kahn, Ellen Lanyon, Miyoko Ito, Seymour Rosofsky, and Margo Hoff, and more recent artists who emerged in the ’60s, including Philip Hanson, Christina Ramberg, and Jimmy Wright. A small, very early lithograph by Claes Oldenburg, made at Ox-Bow in the early ’50s when he was a student there, and a recent watercolor by German artist Peter Brötzmann, who was a visiting artist at the school in 2005, show the international scope of the alumni and associates.

The exhibition is part of a summer-long celebration on a grand scale. Also opening Saturday, June 26th at Roots & Culture (http://www.rootsandculturecac.org) will be a show featuring contemporary Ox-Bow artists, including Betsy Rupprecht (whose parents are both represented in the CvsD exhibit), Mike Andrews, Jonah Groeneboer, Shara Hughes, George Liebert, Anna Mayer, Aspen Mays, Carmen Price, Melanie Schiff, Andrew Winship, and Nate Wolf. Another exhibition covering historical and contemporary artists from Ox-Bow runs from June 4 – August 22 at the Grand Rapids Art Museum (http://www.artmuseumgr.org); John Corbett of CvsD will present a lecture titled “Ox-Bow: Now & Then” on July 23 at 1:30pm at the museum.

In the East Wing of the gallery, CvsD spotlights new work by Chicago artist Gabrielle Garland. Garland’s intimate paintings focus on interior spaces – brilliantly colored, delightfully warped unpopulated domestic scenes. Her larger, slightly Hockneyesque graphite drawings feature landscape and architecture, with a dazzling range of marks from wild and expressionistic to fastidious and precise.